“You will not find a person that will say a bad word about him,” says Scott Stuber, Universal’s president of production. With the exception of a few rival agent who claim that the size of Newman’s list limits his effectiveness, Stuber is right. “You remember who talks to you when you’re nobody,” says one executive. “Robert does.” “I trust Bob,” says DreamWorks’ Mike De Luca. “There’s no bullshit. I think he tells the truth.” “Here’s the postscript to your story,” another executive tells me. “Thank God the movie business has him.”
All this was seeming like a bit much when I checked my voice mail one afternoon and found myself in Newman’s pocket. I couldn’t see a thing. But I could hear plenty.
“They withdrew the offer,” I could hear Newman saying. “If I’d been a total pig about it, okay. But …” He was talking to somebody — but not to me — on one of his two cellular phones. Probably it was one of his colleagues at ICM or someone else he keeps on speed dial. “I told them,” he was saying. “I said, ‘Look, money is money.’”
Then I realized: I was on his speed dial, too. He doesn’t usually do business on his cell phone, but we had been trading phone calls at a film festival, and he was on the run. By accident Newman had dialed my answering machine on his one, pocketed phone while doing business on the other. The voice mail message was a journalist’s dream: a chance to witness my subject without being present, to see what emerged when I wasn’t around.
“It’s going to be the fucking biggest Bond movie ever!” Newman said. “Right?” There was a loud rustling. I imagined Newman waving his arms. There was a squeak of car brakes. Newman’s voice was fading. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said as static rose. “The cast members: Brian. Denzel. Ed. All right? Cool. Later!”
I was familiar with the Newman who knew I was there. Now I compared him to the Newman who didn’t. The uncensored Newman sounded exactly like the one I’d already met.
EVEN AS A KID, ROBERT NEWMAN understood the art of the deal. During the years when he lived for comic books, he staked out the newsstand at the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn, learning the delivery schedule for his favorite titles and boning up on artists.
“It wasn’t just the A-list,” recalls James Mulligan, who has been Newman’s best friend since they were seven years old. “He could tell you every single comic book that Bernie Wrightson, who was a great horror illustrator, had on the shelves, what was coming out soon, and why it was going to be an interesting read.
“He was somebody who from very early on knew exactly how to say no,” continues Mulligan, now a lawyer in Vermont. “He’d read a price list once and he’d know for all time what Conan the Barbarian number 17 was worth. So if somebody at a comic book convention was trying to sell him something for $4 that was only worth $2.50, he’d just walk away The person would be running after him saying, ‘Wait, I’ll give it to you for $2.75.’ He had an ability to make people come to him.”
Akiva Goldsman, the Oscar-winning screenwriter for A Beautiful Mind, used to play with Newman and Mulligan. “Robbie was very decisive, very aggressive, and therefore very impenetrable to me,” recalls Goldsman, whom Newman still calls “Keevie.” “I did, even then, get the feeling that Robbie somehow was getting the better deal.”
Newman and Mulligan lived on the same block. Both were the only children of single, working moms (Newman was four when his father left his mother; he hasn’t seen him since). When they were teens, the boys ditched comics for the movies. “I think both of us were having some difficulty feeling connected in our day-to-day worlds with our moms,” Mulligan says. “Neither his nor my mom were around much. I think we both took refuge a lot and quite often in film.”
Together they spent hours at retrospective houses like the Elgin Theater, seeing Alfred Hitchcock, the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin. They went to Times Square for schlock — Roger Corman films and William Crain’s Blacula. They saw Bruce Lee’s Fists of Fury, Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, and Bob Fosse’s Lenny. They saw A Clockwork Orange, and from the first frames — the close-up of Malcolm McDowell, the Beethoven, the Moog synthesizer: “Dah!” — they were Kubrick fans.
« 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 ALL »